


First Born Son

by justanothersong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (kinda), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Politics, M/M, Politics, book store au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-14
Updated: 2014-07-14
Packaged: 2018-02-08 19:06:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1952652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean Winchester is the eldest son of the American president, and a prodigal one at that. Always in the tabloids for his partying ways, Dean finally pushes a little too far and winds up beaten and left by the side of the road. When a passing bookseller rescues Dean from an uncertain fate, his father, currently up for re-election on a conservative ticket - thinks it best that Dean take some time out of the spotlight; the meek bookseller seems the perfect excuse to keep Dean out of the limelight until the election is over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Consciousness came with the rain. The patter of cold drops against his painfully split lip is what did it, the rivulets of rainwater tinted red with blood rolling down his chin causing him to wince, one eye blinking open to look up at a canopy of trees and falling rain. Dean cough and spluttered, realizing he was laying out in the open and that the water seemed to be coming harder and faster. He tried to sit up and let out a hoarse howl of pain; he was certain his shoulder was out of the socket and his arm lay useless at his side. He could taste blood and one of his eyes was swollen shut, and Dean struggled to remember what had happened.

The rain fell and he remembered the girl. Bright, laughing eyes, curvy in all the right places. She had smiled, had flirted, and of course he had been drawn in. Bought her some drinks, played a little pool, danced maybe a little too close. 

He didn’t know she was married, how could he have known? There was no ring, and she sure as hell didn’t act it. The bar was a dive, maybe sixty miles outside of the city, and he’d only tagged a long with Benny Lafitte, a senator’s wayward son, to keep whatever happened out of the tabloids. The last girl Dean had taken home from a city club had given intimate details to anyone who would pay, and President Winchester had been red-faced with anger, reading about his son’s exploits with sex and drugs in the morning edition.

The worst of it was that half of it had been lies and embellishments; Dean didn’t touch the hard stuff, not after nearly losing Sam to a cocktail of uppers and prescription drugs at Stanford. And hell, he was a red-blooded single American male with money to spend and a pretty face (or so he had been told) – did anyone really expect him not help himself to all of the available tail that came his way?

Apparently the girl’s husband didn’t, or didn’t expect her to be out offering. He and his buddies, fresh off a late shift working construction, arrived at the bar expecting a few cold ones, not to find his wife leaving on someone else’s arm. Dean didn’t remember much after that.

Benny had left an hour before with an olive-skinned cougar with a Mediterranean accent, leaving Dean to find his own way, and he’d thought he had. He was in decent enough shape, but he was half in the bag and it was six to one – he didn’t remember much after that, until he woke up hurting and wet, in a ditch somewhere dark.

The rain kept falling, a late summer pitter patter turning to an early fall storm all too quickly. When he tried to move an ankle he was fairly certain had been stomped on, Dean realized the muddy water that had been soaking his boots had crept up past his knees, and was still climbing. What fell from the sky only mixed with what was pouring in from a side drop-off of what looked to be a highway, getting deeper as he lay there. Realizing the danger, Dean tried to scramble to his feet, but the sharp pains that riddled his body were far too much; even as he labored to breathe through the stabbing pain, he could tell he had at the least a few broken ribs. 

He tried once more, tasting blood as he moved, but when his bad ankle slid in the mud and his tender ribs connected with the hard-packed side of the ditch, the pain became too much. Dean blacked out and fell back into the water, slipping even further down as the rain continued to fall.


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel had cursed silently to himself as the storm had started. He’d wanted to make it home long before the rain came, but the reading had run late, with so many of his bookstore patrons having arrived to hear Anna Milton read from her memoir. He could admit that it was riveting, the true life tale of a young woman escaping the militaristic cult in which he was raised and finding a new life on her own, and he had thanked the author profusely for choosing Lorem Ipsum as her debut reading venue. She had even been kind enough to gift him with a signed first edition, and he had sold dozens more of the hardbacks to his customers. 

Still, it left him driving his old station wagon in the storm, and worse still, stuck taking the old highway home. The road had gone out of regular use once the expressway had come in four miles east, and the county had stopped servicing the asphalt along the unlit wooded road some time ago. Now, as he drove slowly along, the water from the storm had pooled across the road, at least a few inches deep, and he worried the old Chevy would hydroplane if he dared go any faster.

It had grown colder with the rain and the windows were fogging from the station wagon’s heater, causing the bookseller to lean forward in his seat, squinting against his glasses in order to see the flooded road before him. As he rounded a corner and his headlights swept across the asphalt, something dark seemed to dart out from the side of the road and Castiel forgot his fear of skidding long enough to slam on the brakes.

He took a moment to catch his breath before deciding to venture out into the rain. It was probably an animal, he reasoned; there were always stray dogs and feral cats running around these woods, and the local raccoons had gotten pretty tame with Mrs. Mosely dropping corn feed into the woods to draw them away from her trash cans. He couldn’t fathom leaving some poor animal out there to die alone, when it was his own fault for not watching the road better. 

Castiel kept a flashlight in the glovebox for emergencies and it had saved him from tromping across a dark field in search of water for his radiator or help with a flat and a busted spare on more than one occasion, and he grabbed it out, along with a blanket from the backseat, to go in search of whatever poor creature he had injured. The water was coming down in sheets by then, and he peered under the front wheel with his light to see what damage he had done. The bookseller was puzzled, though relieved, to find not an injured animal there, but a thin flannel shirt that had somehow floated across the flooded roadway.

He frowned, squinting in the rain beading on his glasses and soaking him through to the bone. “That makes no sense,” he muttered as a crack of lightning lit the sky. “Unless…”

He trailed off, glancing in the direction of the roadside ditch where the shirt seemingly had come. He shone his flashlight on the flooded furrow alongside the road just in time to see a pale hand with bloodied knuckles slip below the flood of muddy water.

 

When later recounting what happened next, Castiel felt as though he were telling the tale of something he had seen, rather than something he had done. He had run towards the sight, dropping his flashlight as he went and sending it rolling in the rainwater, beam flashing drunkenly along the trees as it went. His loafers were no match for the broken asphalt and rainwater of the highway and he had tripped, hitting hard enough to tear his slacks and bloody his knees at the edge of the road, reaching blindly into the irrigation ditch to grasp the body beneath the muck and pull it out.

The man had clearly been badly beaten, face a mess of swelling and bruises. There was blood all over his clothing and his shirt looked to be ripped and torn, and worst of it all, Castiel was positive he wasn’t breathing. Alone on the side of an old highway, with thunder rumbling across the sky and the rain making a river of the roadway, Castiel pulled the stranger from the flood. His CPR training seemed eons ago, training for a teenage turn as a summer camp counselor, but he did his best, pumping the man’s chest and passing breath between his lips, praying that he had found the stranger in time.

The moments passed in slow motion, each desperate breath hoping that the stranger would be able to take his own. The rain just kept coming and Castiel’s glasses were knocked askew in his haste, blinding him slightly in the downpour, but he kept pushing on; despite the chill that had set in the air and the cold of the water, the stranger was still somewhat warm to the touch, and he hoped that meant he had arrived in time.

When the man finally took a pained breath, Castiel felt as though he had been holding his own.

He never knew where he found the strength after that, to lift and carry the man into the backseat of his station wagon. He felt as though he had run a marathon after administering CPR, his arms and legs feeling rubbery and weak as he went, but the adrenaline pumping through his veins would not allow him to stop, not until he had sped through the night to the nearest hospital and seen the man rushed into the emergency room. Then he was able to collapse, soaking wet, into a hard plastic chair in the waiting room, shaking all over even as the admission attendant rushed to his side with a blanket and hot drink.

He didn’t even remember being helped to a wheelchair and taken to a gurney in the back, slipped out of his soaked clothing and into a hospital gown, piled over with warmed blankets. The nurses that spoke to him sounded far away, talking about exposure and hypothermia and shock, until he fell into a dead sleep in his cubicle.

The last words that had passed his lips were to ask if the man from the ditch was alright.


End file.
